Is Your Digital Strategy Still in the Stone Age?

What is missing in many teams’ digital strategy? The final word – ‘strategy’.

Back to front thinking

Often, I see the digital strategy is literally buying something digital then tacking on a strategy. So often when I talk to pharma digital teams’ I ask what their strategic objectives are and how they are being measured. What I see repeatedly is many start with buying a cool tech or digital platform, and then try to find a strategy for it. I call this ‘shiny object syndrome’. I remember this happening with more than one Pharma client; they have bought an amazing personalization platform or some cool augmented reality kit, and then asked Eularis to come up with a strategy to fit the platform or tech. That is all fine but, ideally, start with the strategy, and then determine what digital tools fit.

Old school measurements

If we look at a subcomponent of digital strategy – digital marketing strategy – and how it is measured, shockingly, many measure their results by ‘likes’, ‘follows’, ‘clicks’ and so forth and not real strategic measures for their brands. Many digital strategists tend to be digital natives and distracted by online popularity rather than trying to meet the real strategic objectives for their company brands. We need to think of digital as channels that support our business strategic objectives that are measured by real world results in terms of brand share gain and revenue and profit growth.

Lack of digital and non-digital integration

Another issue I see repeatedly in pharma digital strategy is not integrating digital activities with non-digital activities. They are not working in harmony as a well-oiled machine. It is like they are in different departments that are not speaking.

These systems are failing.

In order to be successful in their business strategies, companies and brands need to differentiate themselves by adopting a customer-centered strategy that is measured by real world business results and implemented with a well -integrated digital and non-digital strategy and implementation.

Execs need to analyze and integrate individual customer needs on all their touch points simultaneously (digital and non-digital), and incorporate into the system an understanding of the evolution of how the relationship with each individual customer is developing automatically.

Start with your customer

One needs to really understand the customer and deliver superior customer experience and value. Ensuring you meet your customers’ needs and expectations and providing value to the customer, along with a superior customer experience, is critical. Today’s customers have much higher expectations from companies and expect to get all their needs met 24/7 online. They want access when they want it – on demand. They want the experience to be targeted precisely to their needs. In addition, they want it to be easy. Are your digital services able to meet these needs? Because of the increased sophistication of customers, 70% of the buying decision journey is completed with no sales involvement. Research from CEB also shows that, on average, 5.4 people are now involved in an average B2B buying process. This is also true for pharmaceuticals, as the stakeholders increase and the interactions become more complex. The brand has to convey trust to a varied group of stakeholders, all with different needs, who are seeking information in different ways.

The process pharma follows to understand their customer starts with conducting market research with a small sample size, then mapping the customer journey. Most of these are very basic and simple and do not reflect the diversity of real customers’ journeys. Many teams then attempt to identify the personas within the journey. However, in doing this, they are using assumptions and rules, and lumping broad groups of people together roughly into a few personas. It is not granular to the very real and very varied people who are your customers.

Map what value your brand offers to the customer needs and wants

It is not about the brand/medicine, but the customer needs around that condition. In thinking about drug brands, each of these questions brings a specific client to mind about how they successfully did this by strategy and nothing to do with the product itself.

One client in the US was bringing a product to market, which was an identical compound to all the generics on the market – but they were charging a premium as a branded generic. They analysed their audience using various AI approaches, then created a ‘beyond the pill’ strategy that was highly successful. Despite the product being identical to everything else on the market, they wrapped it in great relevant integrated digital and non digital marketing and services to both physicians and their patients and product was hugely successful.

Another client licensed a compound from another company and gave it a new brand name. Both versions of the compound were in the market from different companies and under different brand names. So, although they were an identical product, they were competing on strategy. The product was for paediatric oncology. The original brand marketed its efficacy and functional benefits to paediatric oncologists as one would expect. They were fairly successful. The second version of the brand – the licensed new brand – had to completely rethink its strategy in order to be able to compete with the successful originator. They researched not only the oncologists and their patients but the patients’ ecosystem. They also ensured that the paediatric oncologists understood the brand was identical to the brand they already trusted, and then they researched the parents of the patients and came up with a strategy directed at cancer patients’ parents. It was highly emotive and highly successful and integrated digital and non-digital channels to achieve the strategic aim. The licensed version of the drug surpassed the original drug dramatically and became the best seller in the market.

Both illustrate that the base strategy based on understanding the customer is the core differentator, as in both cases the compound was identical. Get your core strategy right first by understanding your customers thoroughly, then plan how to achieve the strategy with your channels and tech.

Ensuring customer‐centered innovation

Amazon, Google, and Apple customers expect user-centered interactions that are simple and meet their needs. Patients, physicians and other stakeholders are interacting with brands before they ever use them. Pharma are not using this enough in their digital planning process; if they are, it is not done in an engagement-led way. User-centered innovation is typically done well by start-ups but not by Pharma. It is often missed across sales management processes in Pharma, with disparate digital efforts all being conducted in a piecemeal way. This needs to change.

Using Artificial Intelligence to deliver unique digital customer engagement journeys

The issue with the traditional approaches and even the rules-based next best action approaches is that every customer has slightly (or often vastly) different journey – even though they can be segmented into groups. Each customer has different touch points, different sequences of content and channel consumption to get to the brand result. Even if a company is using a CMS platform for ‘next best action’, most of these are run on human-based assumptions and rules.

It doesn’t have to be this way with the available tech today. AI can pick through the complex web of a trail each customer has made and predict what content, channel, and sequence moving forward will be best for each individual in the system. This is not fantasy. Eularis have done this for a client in the past and so have other companies.

For this kind of project we take all input from all channels, combine them in AI-powered integration engines, add a temporal tag to every ‘event’, then put it through the integration engine and into the Artificial Intelligence algorithms to pick it apart so that we can get ‘under the hood’ and granulate each individual customer’s journey to get a better understanding of how these journeys evolve and change with the customer. This is not rocket science, but it is complex and requires data. We have a data source for identifying individual physicians’ digital journeys in many markets with consent. That data combined with the client’s customer data and sales data can provide very strong competitive advantages.

Once we understand how the optimal journey would work for each customer, we feed that data (automatically in real-time) to the client’s CMS to serve up (at least in the digital channels) the right content in the right channel at the right time to increase engagement and customer loyalty while also achieving stronger revenue and profit. However, we can integrate the non-digital activities and long as we have the data (usually from their CRM system and channel data). The system can identify that Doctor Smith will respond optimally with x,y and z digital channels with specific content and sequence and a sales rep call inserted at this point in their sequence. This is where when you use AI to analyse individual data and optimize by person at scale. This is where the power of AI-powered digital comes into play.

Integrating many and varied data sources now available means that we can ingest all these different forms of data, integrate the datasets in a consistent format, add a temporal aspect to them, and then write AI algorithms to analyze many things. For example, we can analyze things such as the true customer segments in terms of how they will respond to various things, in addition to the different digital journey they take to come to us. We can examine how frequently people are lost on that journey, and why. We can look at how to quantify the interaction between channels, which customers have the highest potential for growth, which are most influential, which will be likely to respond to a sales rep, and so much more.

By taking all of this analyzed data we can also then predict which content will engage which segments (down to a segment of 1) at which time, in which sequence, at which time. The potential to use this data to design a unique digital journey for an individual customer to maximize engagement and loyalty is enormous. So often, when AI is used in this way, people assume it is an amazing coincidence that this company read their mind and delivered exactly what they were looking for. It is no coincidence. Interestingly, despite all the great engagement we can get prior to interacting with a company, 53% of customer loyalty is driven by the sales experience. So, customers value how sales reps spend their time. What this means is that architecting a unique engagement journey supported by the right content ecosystem and commercial insights are mandatory to achieve sales success. We can now use AI to understand the different stakeholders and their specific needs and predict their behaviour, understand the optimal unique journey for each, and understand what content and channels are required for what individuals to influence their engagement and journey through the buying cycle. By doing this the tools for sales reps can deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time, and this can also be done in the digital channels. We can now create tools that use Artificial Intelligence to analyze the customer and messages required, and deliver a customized message for each customer in real time. Eularis achieved sales increases of 43% for the sales reps using the system in a recent client engagement implementing this. The rewards to those willing to implement can be large.

Pharma need to understand how their customers come to their products and services to ensure that internal capabilities are aligned to the customer needs. Many pharma don’t consider the impact that these types of sales enable-ment have on commercial transformation, and do not design their programs to support this effectively.